I don't pay much attention to any report that doesn't show Illinois as being in the top 10 for gun violence -- Johns381

The leftish think tank Center for American Progress recently published a study that found Alabama’s rate of “gun violence” to be the third highest in the country. The study went on to blame the problem on Alabama’s relatively permissive gun laws.

How can Alabama be third, readers asked, when other states with notoriously violent cities – Illinois (Chicago), Michigan (Detroit), etc. --- didn’t even crack the top 10?

Some of the representative comments:

Big P: A left leaning think tank said it's, so Then it must be true. Just ask the people in Chicago ,IL if they think Alabama has more gun violence. I believe they are at 300 plus and counting from gun deaths, and that's in a state with ever strict. Maybe if these THINK TANKS would spend more time on the problems they are having up north .Instead of trying to change the mindset of the people living down south. Maybe just maybe there would be less dead people in Chicago.

johns381: I don't pay much attention to any report that doesn't show Illinois as being in the top 10 for gun violence.

That the CAP report comes from a liberal source doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong, but it does mean we should approach it with caution and read it skeptically.

Let’s take a closer look the authors' methodology.

The report looked at 10 statistical measures of “gun violence” rates and ranked each state accordingly. It then averaged each state’s rank in those ten categories to come up with an aggregate, or “overall,” rank for the state’s rate of “gun violence.”

I'm putting "gun violence" in quotations because some of their statistical categories, while gun related, might not be what most of us think of when we think about gun violence. More on that later, though.

For now, let's look at the individual statistical categories and the sources they used to come up with their ranking.

1: OVERALL FIREARM DEATHS IN 2010

Alabama’s rank: 4

Alabama had 16.36 firearm deaths per 100,000 residents. This figure includes all gun deaths, intentional, accidental and suicidal. Source: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which you can see here. To access the data, click on Fatal Injury Reports 1999-2010, which, after agreeing to terms of use, will bring up a query screen where you can create all kinds of interesting reports, including the rate of gun deaths for states, regions and the national average. The CDC gets its numbers from data pulled from death certificates, which are required in all 50 states.

2: OVERALL FIREARM DEATHS from 2001-2010

Alabama’s rank: 4

Alabama had 16.62 firearm deaths per 100,000 residents. Again, this includes all kinds of firearm deaths. Source: The CDC.

3: FIREARM HOMICIDE DEATHS in 2010

Alabama’s rank: 3

Alabama had 5.92 homicides by firearm per 100,000 in 2010. This number does not include accidental deaths, suicides or killings by law enforcement officers in the line of duty. Source: The CDC. Astute readers Hydrochloric and Mobile Marine pointed out that the CDC numbers are widely different than the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report data. The FBI put Alabama’s 2010 rate for “non-negligent homicides” that involved a gun at 2.8 per 100,000 residents, half the rate found that year by the CDC and close to the national median.

This had me stumped for a while, and I probably would have just had to write the discrepancy off as an anomaly, had I not spoken with James Alan Fox, a criminologist with Northeastern University. Fox was puzzled by the difference too, so he started drilling into the FBI data and found that the city of Birmingham did not report homicide data for 2010. That’s why the FBI reported so many fewer homicides in Alabama than the CDC did. The FBI report was missing data from one of Alabama’s largest and most violent cities.

Given that information, it seems wise to put more stock in the CDC numbers, which come straight from the death certificates. The FBI numbers rely on the accuracy and consistency of local police departments who are supposed to report their data but don't always do so.

Franklin E. Zimring, a professor at the University of California, Berkley, said that, when there’s a discrepancy between CDC and FBI death statistics, put your money on the CDC. “ They are in the death statistics business, and have been for a long time,” he said.

View full sizeThis chart compares the rate of certain kinds of gun deaths in Alabama as compared to the national average.

4: FIREARM SUICIDES in 2010

Alabama’s rank: 13

Alabama had 9.5 suicides by firearm per 100,000 in 2010. Source: The CDC

5: WOMEN KILLED BY FIREARMS from 2001-2010

Alabama’s rank: 3

For every 100,000 people in Alabama, 3.35 women were killed by a gun in the 10 years from 2001 to 2010. This includes only homicides (killings by a person other than the victim), and excludes killings by law enforcement officers in the line of duty. Source: The CDC.

6: FIREARM DEATHS AMONG CHILDREN 1-17 from 2001-2010

Alabama’s rank: 8

In the decade from 2001 to 2010, 310 children died as the result of a firearm. That comes out to a rate of 2.78 deaths per 100,000 residents. These figures include homicides, suicides and accidents. Source: The CDC.

7: OFFICERS KILLED BY FIREARMS from 2002-2011

Alabama’s rank: 4

A total of 19 officers of the law were “feloniously” killed with a firearm in Alabama in the decade between 2002 and 2011, according to the CAP report. Source: The Federal Bureau of Investigations statistics. Note: The FBI report shows that 20 officers were killed during that period. It’s unclear how the CAP researchers determined that 19 of those were shot.

8: AGGRAVATED ASSAULTS WITH A FIREARM in 2011

Alabama’s rank: 23

There were 1,607 assaults with firearms in 2011, which works out to a rate of 40.50 per 100,000 residents. Source: The FBI’s Uniform Crime Report. Gary Kleck, a professor at Florida State University’s College of Criminology and Criminal Justice, said that gun assault rates are one of the worst measures of gun violence a study can use because many of them go unreported. Furthermore, the rate at which they go unreported varies over time and geography, he said.

9: CRIME-GUN EXPORT RATE in 2009

Alabama’s rank: 5

In 2009, law enforcement recovered 1,561 guns that had been exported from the state of Alabama and used in crimes in other states. That equates to about 33.2 so-called “crime-gun exports” per 100,000 people. Source: Mayors Against Illegal Guns. The MAIG report cites the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives as the source of its data, but does not link back to the raw ATF data.

10: TIME-TO-CRIME in 2009

Alabama’s rank: 19

In 2009, 22.6 percent of recovered crime guns had been purchased from a licensed dealer within two years. The ATF, according to the report, says that a high percentage of guns with a time-to-crime of less than two years is indicative of gun trafficking. Source: Mayors Against Illegal Guns.

View full sizeThis graph plots the states according to their relative gun violence (from more violence to less, vertically) and the strength of their gun laws (from weaker to stronger, horizontally). The analysis was done by the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank.

So, what's the takeaway?

We can set aside the Mayors Against Illegal Guns data, since it comes from an advocacy group and doesn’t really measure “gun violence” per se. Also, not all of the statistical categories used in the CAP report seem like measures of violence that could be affected by stricter gun laws, advocacy for which seems to be the report’s primary purpose. Someone who is suicidal could just as easily off themselves with a kitchen knife or some sleeping pills and a bottle of vodka, making the relative availability of a firearm irrelevant.

But the other measures – homicides, slayings of police officers – are accurately reported statistics from reputable sources. The study appears to be spot on when it says that Alabama has disproportionately high rates of gun violence.

The CAP report walks on shakier ground, though, when it attempts to connect gun deaths with loose gun laws.

The report makes the connection by mapping the states according to their relative gun violence and the strength of their gun laws. According to the resulting graph, gun violence increases as gun laws weaken.

However, the correlation seems to be loose. For example, Vermont has very loose gun laws but low gun violence.

Academics have studied the effect of gun laws on gun deaths, but their findings are all over the map.

Researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham found that states with stronger background checking requirements are associated with a 7 percent reduction in homicides and a 2 percent reduction in suicides.

Kleck, a professor the Florida State University criminologist, has found that Washington D.C.'s super-strict gun laws had no impact on overall homicide levels.

Justice Stephen Breyer complained about the lack of a definitive answer in 2008, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down some of the nation’s strictest gun laws on the grounds that they violated the Constitution’s Second Amendment. “The upshot is a set of studies and counter studies that, at most, could leave a judge uncertain about the proper policy conclusion,” he wrote in his dissenting opinion.

The CAP report authors seem to be aware of the difficulty in drawing a straight line linking gun laws and gun deaths, as they go to some lengths to couch their conclusion. “While this analysis demonstrates a correlation between weak laws and bad gun-violence outcomes, a correlation does not necessarily imply causation," they said in the report.

Many AL.com readers seemed to have correlation/causation fallacies of their own, as they implied that Alabama’s gun violence problem is really a black people problem.

Workforlivn and others pointed to a Washington Post story that shows that most homicide victims are black. More black residents, their argument seems to run, equals more homicides.

That’s true, statistically speaking, but what difference does it make in terms of addressing the problem? Is Alabama’s gun violence less lamentable because most of the victims are black?

Until Alabamians can accept that there is a problem and that it’s everyone’s problem, expect gun violence in this state to persist.